From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages (commonly also Chukchi-Kamchatkan) are a language family of northeastern Siberia. Less commonly encountered synonyms for this family are Chukchian, Chukotian (or Chukotan), Kamchukchee and Kamchukotic. Of these, 'Chukchian' and 'Chukotian' are ambiguous since both terms sometimes refer specifically to the family's northern branch. Adding to the confusion, Luorawetlan (or Luoravetlan) has been widely used as the family's name since 1775 although it is properly the self-designation of its main component language. (The derivative Luorawetlanic is, perhaps, preferable as a family name.)

The family consists of five languages. It is divided into a northern and a southern branch.

The northern branch, sometimes called Chukotian in a narrow sense (or better, Chukotkan or Chukotic), is spoken in two autonomous regions which lie at the extreme northeast of Russia, bounded on the east by the Pacific and on the north by the Arctic. It includes four closely related languages:

• Chukchi, also called Luorawetlan (Luoravetlan), spoken mostly within Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
• Koryak, also called Nymylan, spoken in Koryak Autonomous Okrug. The main dialect is known as Chavchuven Koryak.
• Alutor (Aliutor, Alyutor), also spoken in Koryakia. According to Fortescue (2005), Palana Koryak and Alutor should be considered dialects of a single language.
• Kerek, spoken along the southern coast of Chukotka. In 1997 two elderly speakers remained, but now the language is extinct, with the ethnic group assimilated into the Chukchi (Fortescue 2005: 1).

The southern branch (termed Kamchatkan or Kamchatic) is spoken on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It now consists of a single language, although there are incomplete records attesting several others:

• Itelmen, also called Kamchadal. It includes the Ukä and Sedanka dialects. Itelmen had 100 or fewer speakers in 1991, mostly of the older generation.

The relationship of the Chukotkan languages to Itelmen is distant, and has only been conclusively demonstrated recently.

All the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages are under pressure from Russian. Almost all speakers are bilingual in Russian, and most younger members of the ethnic groups associated with the languages speak Russian only.

The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages have no proven relation to any other language family. They are sometimes classed among the Paleosiberian languages, a catch-all term for language groups with no known kinship with one another that are believed to have been present in Siberia prior to the advances of Turkic and Tungusic.

One well-known hypothesis joining these languages to a larger group is that of the late Joseph Greenberg, who identified Chukotian (his name for Chukotko-Kamchatkan) as a branch of a super-family of languages that he calls Eurasiatic. Greenberg also assigns the Paleosiberian languages Gilyak (Nivkh) and Yukaghir to this super-family. This hypothesis remains controversial, as it relies on Greenberg's own Mass Lexical Comparison, rather than the conventional Comparative Method.

• Fortescue, Michael (2005) Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary. Trends in Linguistics 23. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter